About Functional Cortical Specialization: The Development of Face Recognition

摘要: Studying the relationship between the development of the brain and the emergence (or decline) of specific cognitive abilities is a useful way of approaching the links between brain and behaviour, in addition to what is being done in fields of investigation such as human adult neuropsychology and animal neurobiology. Anything that can be learned about how a competence functions in the early stages of its development will tell us something about how it will be organized in later life. A model for the way in which a competence works in adulthood would not be valid if it did not fit in with what is known about how that competence develops. How does the brain manage during its postnatal maturation to sort out its surroundings into relevant categories of objects and events and to build up appropriate representations in such a way that even children living in quite different environments all seem to sort out the same categories of objects and events at approximately the same stage of infancy? What constraints having to do with the organization and functioning of the brain, and what constraints arising from the environment may interact so consistently that they shape the learning processes of all the members of the species (and possibly those of some other species) on the same lines, and so that the adult competences which eventually emerge are all organized in a very similar way?This debate has been going on for a long time, but there are still so few relevant empirical data available that all we have at the moment are a few scenarios, the plausibility of which varies depending on the kind of cognitive competences under investigation.